Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg completely flipped the script on the climate activists in the media and academia who were predicting hurricane catastrophe for the U.S. this year. Here’s a hint: the climate Armageddon never happened.
Lomborg unleashed a pretty spicy take in a December 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed that’s sure to make heads explode in the leftist press: “Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes.” Say what?
Lomborg’s core argument was that “Scientific and media bias promote the illusion that global warming produces nothing but bad results.” Talk about a plot twist.
MRC Business drafted a roundup November 24 of outlets like The New York Times and CBS News that were all clamoring to make readers and viewers believe that the end was nigh before hurricane season kicked in. CNN meteorologist Briana Waxman, for example, scare-mongered August 4 that “Primetime hurricane season is here, and the Atlantic is a powder keg.”
For all the climate brouhaha, the final tally for this year’s hurricane season amounted to just 13 tropical storms and five hurricanes with no U.S. landfall, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Watch CBS Evening News Co-Anchor John Dickerson's initial doom reporting on hurricane season from May below
Lomborg took note of the extreme bias media types continue to look through whenever they’re trying to make a changing climate out to be the boogeyman adults should be seeing in their nightmares:
These analyses typically run climate models simulating the world as it is today, with elevated sea-surface temperatures, and compare them with a hypothetical preindustrial world with cooler oceans. If a hurricane is more likely in the former scenario than in the latter, the conclusion is that climate change made the hurricane more likely …
But notice what’s missing from the coverage. A New York Times article in October highlighted hurricanes ‘turning away from the East Coast,’ noting 12 named storms so far but only one minor tropical storm brushing the U.S. This was framed as welcome relief, with the misses attributed to atmospheric steering patterns like the Bermuda high-pressure system. Not once did the piece invoke climate change. The journalists seem to believe that climate change can cause only bad outcomes.
Did you catch that? Climate change, as a concept, is practically always framed dubiously to be some kind of death knell, when the opposite could also be true, if journalists and reporters even attempted to be logically consistent. As Lomborg concluded: “If warmer oceans energize storms, couldn’t they also influence other meteorological phenomena that diverted this year’s hurricanes harmlessly out to sea? No one ran the models to check. No professors lined up for quotes.”
This isn’t an “anomaly,” Lomborg wrote. In fact, it’s reflective of a “pattern” that’s been going on in media coverage for years. “Dig into past coverage, and you’ll find climate framing in hurricane coverage dating back to the mid-2000s—tying intense storms and active seasons again and again to global warming,” Lomborg recounted. As was the case then, Lomborg rebuked that “[t]hese stories overflow with experts declaring each event a harbinger of climate doom, backed by fresh attribution studies. Yet when reality bucks this narrative, no one makes the connection.”
Oof. Put some ice, er, climate change on that burn.
